


Salineas Falls

by Geckinator3000



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Bittersweet Ending, Gen, Ocean, Past Catra, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-08
Updated: 2020-09-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:53:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26357512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Geckinator3000/pseuds/Geckinator3000
Summary: Kingdoms seldom crumble in a day.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 8





	Salineas Falls

Salineas fell the way most kingdoms do: brick by brick by brick. Some days the bricks fell in a thundering rush that pummeled the ocean to frothing madness; other days it was just a little crumbling mortar, dribbling into the sea to be ground to sand by the endless might of the waves.

It requires a special kind of person to live with the sea, and the people of Salineas were every kind of special imaginable, fins, spines, scales, gills and all.  
Out here on the edge of the world, where the earth dropped away to bottomless blue, there was no telling what the next day would bring. Some days brought biting salt winds that ate away skin and stone alike, some nights thunderstorms that churned the deep into mountain ranges and hammered Salineas with sheets of icy rain. Other mornings, however, the sun rose golden over sea calm as far as the eye could see, deep blue under endless blue skies. The fish would dart in flashing, glinting shoals through the reefs, like the butterflies of some underwater meadow.

Salineans took each day as it came, and gave thanks for it all.  
Except, that is, for the day the Horde came.

***

They say the sea calls to everyone. It is usually the last frontier on any watery planet: when every mountain has been climbed and the heart of every forest explored, the depths of the ocean still remain unknown, and their magnetism is timeless and irresistible. The sea is patient. The sea is powerful. The sea is fierce.

So was Hordak. Confronted by a seemingly endless expanse of water, he possessed an equally endless resolve to conquer. His first few boats were smashed into smithereens, but he was no quitter. He drove his armies hard as he worked late into the night on refining his technological monsters until they were perfected.

They called them Riptides, and they came in droves, their pointed double-prowed hulls slicing through the waves. Deck-mounted cannons spat fire and smoke at the towering walls, and did not prevail. Nerissa and Marin, the Queen and King of Salineas, drowned the entire fleet in a single tidal wave. But the next week, there came another, and then another, and each wore away at the walls a little more.

Then the whales surfaced, called from the open seas to give their aid. Outfitted with armour, they overturned the ships and sank them, but months later, the ships could no longer be overturned: Hordak had made Submergyres: submersible watercraft with an internal chamber that could turn in any direction, like a gyroscope. The powers of the Seafolk could not prevail against them, save to dash them against the cliffs of Salineas, in which case they exploded and damaged the walls, or drive them out to sea, in which case they came spinning back again. 

Still, the Sea-Gate held and the walls were thick, though they crumbled, brick by brick by brick. The soldiers of Salineas fell with them and stained the ocean red with blood.

***

It took both method and madness to shatter the Sea-Gate, and Catra had both in ample quantities. She twitched her tail and revelled, for once, in the sea air as she watched Salineas appear over the horizon as though it were rising from the water.  
Catra hated water, so it seemed only fair to her that any kingdom associated with it should be flattened, especially one she had failed to conquer before. Her fur bristled with indignation at the memory. 

“I will not be humiliated by a bunch of fish-people! Not today!” she half-muttered to herself.

“Do not worry, Catra. We will surely obliterate them on this day, and your shame will be buried in smoking rubble.” Hordak answered, appearing suddenly behind her with a fearsome grin and an even more fearsome-looking arm-cannon. 

Catra startled a little, and made a mental note to keep her thoughts to herself in the future. She kept forgetting how keen Hordak’s ears were.  
Still, she had to smile. “Shame buried in smoking rubble, huh? Sounds good to me! I betcha Big Brother will be super impressed when he sees the damage we’ll deal out today!”

Hordak was quiet for a moment before he spoke again, gravely. “Yes, on this day, both you and I shall be redeemed and honour shall be restored at last.”

***

Their confidence was not misplaced, for they came in such crushing force that the Battle of Salineas should really have been called a Massacre.  
Nearly two decades of picking away at their defenses had left the armies of the Seafolk in tatters, and with the Princess Alliance well-distracted in Brightmoon, they didn’t even stand a chance. The Horde was met by three brave ships and one valiant old whale. She sank two Horde ships, and then was sunk herself by a shot that blew one of her flukes clean off. She retreated in a cloud of blood, pursued by the last of the limping Salinean ships, sails hanging ragged in the wind as they hurried to her aid. It was all they could do, now. Their other two ships had been reduced to matchsticks in minutes, and now their kingdom was reduced to one wounded whale.

“Let them go,” said Hordak, dismissively. “They are inconsequential, and there is no honour to be found in harrying wounded prey when a grander prize lies to close at hand.”  
The air around his arm cannon shimmered as it warmed up, its gaping maw beginning to glow a malevolent red. The Sea Gate was in their sights now, unprotected, just a few hundred metres away.  
Hordak raised the cannon, grinning in the bloody light it cast off. He fired, and a white-hot beam tore through the space between them and the gate in the blink of an eye, making a sound like it was ripping the air apart. The gate was obliterated in an instant, and the blast even hit the castle behind it. Hordak watched two immense towers slide into the sea, and glanced back to see Catra’s satisfied smirk. 

“Good, very good Hordak! But I don’t think just one blast is enough, is it?” she purred.  
“Indeed. We came here to crush Salineas, and crush it we shall! Send out orders to the rest of the fleet. We will sail right through that gate into the heart of this kingdom, and destroy it for good. Its ruins will be a monument to our conquest for whatever is left of Etherian history.”  
Two hours later, Salineas slumped into the sea, eviscerated, and the Princesses arrived too late.

Mermista wept over its ruins and retreated to Brightmoon where she allowed herself a few days of eating icecream in the bathtub to convince the others that she really was processing this. She wasn’t. She couldn't. There was no time for real grief, not in the midst of war.

***

Weeks later, as a king tide crept in over the rubble and the stars wheeled overhead, a tiny fairy wrasse dared to flit across the sand to explore. A chunk of stone had crushed her home in the reef, and this new pile of rocks looked promising. She fanned her fins busily, swishing the sand away, and carried off a few stray pebbles in her mouth. There. A new home, in the mouth of an old stone statue that had once adorned the walls of Salineas. 

In the coming days, her whole shoal would move in, taking up residence in various nooks and crannies and hunting for invertebrates in the rubble. As the years passed, the corals would grow, and in twenty years the ruined city would become a new reef. The Salineans would return with the fishes and like the reef, they would rebuild on whatever they could find. 

After all, Salineans were the people of the sea, and like the sea, they were fierce, and they were powerful, and they were patient.

**Author's Note:**

> Someone on Tumblr requested fanfic about the Battle of Salineas, so, here it is I guess! It was hard to write, because honestly there wasn't much of a battle, in the show. I think it adds a lot of poignancy, seeing how after all that time, there was barely anyone left to fight for Salineas.  
> Ps, the whale's name is Minnie and she survives, in case you were wondering. She now tours the sea as an advocate for amputees and those injured by the war.  
> Fairy wrasse are very much real, and they do genuinely like rubble! Look them up: they're very pretty.   
> Hope you enjoyed the story! Check out my other works if you liked it.


End file.
